On the heels of multiple mishaps on new Boeing 787s, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered the Dreamliner to be grounded. Is it an unprecedented move?

The FAA's big announcement on Wednesday night couldn't have come at a worse time for LOT Polish Airlines. Poland's flag carrier was flying its first Boeing 787 Dreamliner flight from Warsaw to Chicago when the directive came from Washington: All Boeing 787 aircraft operated by U.S. carriers were to be grounded, and the FAA recommended that its counterparts at aviation authorities overseas do the same.

Taxis were already pulling up to O'Hare to drop off travel journalists and industry VIPs for the return trip to Warsaw—a much-publicized, milestone flight that would have marked the first regularly scheduled 787 service from the U.S. to Europe—when the news came in. In the shadow of Boeing's Chicago headquarters, the flight had to be cancelled. The balloons and polka would be saved for another day.

Boeing's Very Long Day

Boeing's woeful Wednesday began around dinnertime Tuesday, U.S. time. An All Nippon Airways (ANA) 787 flying a domestic hop to Tokyo from the western Japanese city of Ube was forced to make an emergency landing in Takamatsu after pilots saw battery warning lights flashing and reported smoke in the cockpit. After touchdown, the crew deployed evacuation slides and all 129 passengers and eight crewmembers quickly deplaned without injury.

Upon inspection of the plane's aft electronics bay, the cause turned out to be yet another problem with one of the 787's lithium-ion batteries, which had already been a main focus of an FAA probe after one caught fire on a Japan Airlines 787 at Boston's Logan Airport on January 7.

A few hours later, ANA made the call to voluntarily ground its 787 fleet pending further investigation of the battery problems. Its main rival, Japan Airlines, which experienced a battery fire and two fuel leaks the week before, said it would also ground its 787s, meaning half the world's Dreamliner fleet was out of service within a few hours.

By Wednesday morning American time, both Boeing and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) dispatched investigators to Japan. About 12 hours later, the FAA ordered the American-based planes grounded. United Airlines, the only U.S.-based operator of the 787 so far, with six in service, immediately announced that it would comply with the order. By Thursday morning, all five remaining 787 operators around the world had said they, too, would ground their Dreamliners indefinitely as they await the FAA's guidance.

Batteries in Focus

As part of their effort to reduce fuel consumption by 20 percent compared with similarly sized planes such as the 767, Boeing engineers designed the 787 to rely more extensively on batteries than any previous aircraft had. During the 787's initial certification process, FAA regulators—wary of lithium-ion batteries' potential to fail in spectacular fashion—issued explicit rules about the batteries' behavior as a special condition of allowing the plane's operation.

Among the seven rules are provisions that the batteries must not emit heat, flames, gases, or fluid that can potentially damage other systems on the aircraft. Based on initial reports from the NTSB, these conditions were broken during both the ANA and Japan Airlines battery incidents.

The NTSB was already hard at work examining the Japan Airlines battery at the time of the ANA incident. Board members had assembled a team that included representatives from the battery manufacturer, GS Yuasa, as well as Boeing, Japan Airlines, the FAA, and others. In addition to performing computed tomography (CT) scans on both the battery that caught fire and an undamaged battery, investigators planned to dissect both batteries and compare their structures in an effort to determine the fire's cause.

Was it an improperly produced batch of batteries, a maintenance procedure failure at the airline, or a design problem that could require refits of the aircraft itself? That answer will go a long way toward determining how long the 787 will be grounded.

And the FAA, which launched its own investigation of the 787's design and construction days before ordering them grounded, will also be looking at its own certification process. Without a budget or manpower to put individual components through exhaustive testing, the agency often certifies such equipment by analyzing data provided by the manufacturers themselves. This is precisely how the FAA originally determined that the 787's battery systems were safe—with the agency pouring over 200,000 hours of flight data provided by Boeing, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Boeing maintains that the 787 underwent the most thorough FAA certification process ever performed. Still, the agency will be looking for anything it might have missed the first time around.

Rare FAA Move

It is common for new aircraft to undergo some "teething problems" as they enter service. Most often, such problems cause minor annoyances to airlines and passengers in the form of delays and cancellations. New aircraft are often sold via contracts that guarantee a certain level of reliability; gradually, the plane builder and the customer work together to iron out the kinks.

For example, an exhaustive 1996 recap detailing the Boeing 777's first year of airline service notes some frustrating but minor problems with door seals and engine gaskets. "Both [Boeing and United] agree that the 777's initial reliability has been outstanding compared to that of any airliner before it, but both also admit that the year revealed unexpected snags, despite intensive efforts to 'wring out the bugs' before delivery," FlightGlobal.com reported then.

But airline analyst Henry Harteveldt of the consulting group Hudson Crossing says he is hard-pressed to think of any modern parallel to the 787's string of setbacks and government investigations. The closest example, he says, was in 2010, when three airlines grounded their relatively new Airbus A380 fleets following a serious engine failure aboard a Qantas jet. In that case, the airlines acted voluntarily, not under the direction of government regulators. The planes flew again within a few months after engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce identified and resolved the defect.

While the FAA in recent years has temporarily grounded aircraft types on an individual airline basis because of safety concerns—such as the American Airlines MD-80 fleet in 2008—the agency has not remanded an entire model to the hangar in 34 years.

The last plane to have its operating certificate temporarily revoked was the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 in June 1979. But the DC-10 wasn't a new jet like the 787 at that point; it had been in service for nearly eight years by 1979, and it had already suffered three major accidents—including a crash that killed 271 people—that were at least partially blamed on the plane's design. Despite fixes, the DC-10 was never able to live down a public perception that it was unsafe.

Before the FAA grounding, the Dreamliner generally had impressed passengers with its comfort features, such as its larger windows and higher cabin pressure. And despite the plane's high-profile woes, not one passenger has yet been hurt by a 787. "From that standpoint," Harteveldt says, "the 787's reputation is stronger than the DC-10 when it was grounded."

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